If anyone out there still had doubts about an “online first” breaking news strategy, then surely yesterday laid those doubts to rest.
Because the new online-only D.C.-area news site TBD kicked ass yesterday in a big, big way with its coverage of the Discovery Channel hostage situation.
I spent some time yesterday clicking around, looking for the latest on that story. TBD seemed much more on top of it than did the Washington Post or the Baltimore Sun or CNN. And even when I found stray links and snippets — mostly on Twitter — the links led right back to TBD.
And the startup wasn’t just aggregating. TBD had its own folks on the ground and on the scene. Folks like photographer Jay Westcott, who shot this one of Discovery staffers wheeling kids from the building’s day-care center to safety:
D.C.-based photojournalist Jon Conway tweeted last night:
This @TBD photo is a great example of the power of the moment out weighing perfect focus/iris/composition
Awesome work and most certainly the photo of the day. Find the rest of Westcott’s photo gallery here.
The highlight of the day, however, came mid-afternoon when TBD launched live, streaming video (before it became TBD, you see, the news operation was known as DC’s NewsChannel 8). The Washington Post web folks picked up the feed, superimposed its own logo over top of the feed and presented it on its own site.
I heard the buzz about this but just couldn’t believe the Post would resort to such… such douchebaggery. So I zipped over there and, sure enough:
Just amazing.
This is what’s bothering me about newspapers’ “new media” efforts these days. It’s like we’ve thrown out our ethical standards or something. This is just shameful.
And it’s even more ironic when you consider how snarky the Post was when TBD announced its launch a little less than one month ago.
Anyway, TBD‘s director of community engagement — my former Des Moines Register colleague Steve Buttry — tells Simon Owens of the Next Web blog that the Post had every right to use the video — because of agreements that predated NewsChannel 8′s conversion into TBD — but the Post did not have the right to add its own labeling to the feed.
Steve says he’s satisfied because the Post removed the label quickly enough. Right after media critic David Carr of the New York Times pointed it out on Twitter:
So not only is this a story that lived on Twitter and was perpetuated on Twitter it also self-corrected on Twitter.
Yeah. Yesterday was a real learning experience for us longtime print folks.
Read Eric Thomason‘s review of the day’s TBD coverage here.
Read more about the Washington Post video thing here. Read today’s Post story — which stresses the Twitter angle but carefully does not mention TBD — here.
Find TBD’s home page here. Follow Steve Buttry’s Twitter feed here.
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UPDATE: Steve Buttry might say he’s satisfied. But check out this tweet from early Thursday afternoon:
Thanks, @CNN for sending lunch (thanking us for video provided yesterday). No word on when WaPo might be sending lunch.
Ha!
Before we start popping the champagne for TBD, I would like to know how many of the clicks turned into, you know, revenue. Because providing news for free has done as well as, um, another approach that hasn’t succeeded in turning newspapers around.
Also, I’d say David Carr is the one exhibiting fail. Did he check with anyone about whether the Post had the right to use the feed, or did he just throw up a Twitter post? If he did not check, then that’s a problem.
If people are going to use Twitter to make assumptions without double-checking them, and then to declare “fail” based on those assumptions, then we’re going to end up with a lot of bad information in the pool. That Carr post sounds a lot like an Internet “victory lap,” where someone hasn’t really won anything but then starts declaring victory and running the laps.